Pic Spocket

I really like the TREX sprint triathlon Serie in Brighton Michigan. It’s 3 races during the summer, wednesday evenings, 1 month apart, on the same course. It’s an awesome benchmarking tool to see your progression. It’s pretty popular: 400-500 people show up, surprisingly for a weekday race. The event is well put on, the park and the course are superb and there’s good ambiance with Canadian rocker Ted Lamont playing music.

I have raced the complete serie in 2009 & 2010 for a total of 6 times. As reported last August, I managed to improve on my previous time at every race so far, which is nice! I was hoping to do the same once again. The time to beat was 1:05:08.

Of course, Craig was also doing the race, coming with Tracy and baby Cadence. Here’s a few shots of our youngest fan…

Corinne was there to cheer us on as well, and take these awesome pictures once again!

After setting up and warming up, it was time to line to the start. I was leaving with the first wave, reserved for the faster people. They called it the “Elite” wave, but the term was used loosely here.

1 minute before the start, I see Corinne and Tracy screaming from the beach “Snaaaaake!”. I thought they were joking, trying to make me swim faster (snakes are my phobia). I thought it could be funny, but that they were a bit mean to try to play me like that. Turns out, there was a real one!!!

No sweat though, this was a ridiculously small one, nothing like that beast I saw in Orlando last spring after a training swim.

And off we were..

SWIM 800m in 12:29 (COURSE PB!) with Wetsuit

(I am the black arm in the air, closer to the camera, gold lenses).

Seems like I had a good swim start. According to these photos, it even seems I was in the lead, but I think the camera angle is distorting reality a bit here. Still, I was in the front. But in the middle of the course, things went south a bit. It got a bit rough (lots of contacts), my navigation sucked doing zigzags, and stopped my swim stroke many times.  It’s another one case of  “bad swim but with a decent time”. Of course, the fact that we had a wetsuit (all 3 2010 races were without wetsuit, as water temperature was too high) helped!

Look at the guy below… Don’t let the huge sideburns fool you: he was first out of the water! I ran into him at the line for the toilets before the race, remembered him from Island Lake Tri a few weeks ago and chatted with him. Before too long, the whole line was involved, laughing, when he explained the sideburns were his secret to go faster in the water hehe! One of the next guys was Shawn, one of the guys I often end up fighting with for position at the end of these races. I won some, he won some.

I came out of the water in ~12th position of the ‘Elite” wave . Not too bad.

T1 in 44 seconds
Pretty good, since it includes removing the wetsuit! Grabbed my bike, then ran for my life

The mount line in on the grass there out of T1, and learned from past experience that you better run all the way to the paved path before jumping on the bike, which I did, passing a few people in the process, including arch enemy Shawn hehe!

Bike ~19 km in 28:53 (Course PB)
Norm Power  = 296 watts ; Average Power = 300 watts (w/o zeros)
>>GARMIN DATA

I had my best bike split ever. I held above 300 watts average (w/o zeros) for the whole ride, at ~304 watts. The average went down at the end of the course, because of the slow section of running path.

The whole time, I fought with Shawn, exchanging positions (but falling behind by 3-4 bike lengths every time to stay legal). I knew I was stronger on the bike this year, so I thought I would leave him in the dust this year… turns out he’s been training too! He had that annoyingly noisy rear disc wheel that does this “woohoohoohoo…” sound so you hear him coming everytime he’s about to pass you (I SO WANT ONE OF THESE! hehe!). I still did most of it in the front.

Within a few minutes on the course, we passed all the fastest swimmers, and we were 2nd and 3rd. By 15 km, the first guy which seemed to be from some university’s Tri Team, was in sight with the distance closing. We were getting really close but we ran out of course before we could catch him and lead the race.

We posted the fastest bike split time recorded on this course since 2008. There is one faster time in the inaugural TREX race in 2008, posted by Shawm, and my guess is that the course was different (shorter) then.

Here are me and Shawn arriving at the turn back to transition.

Fear not, I passed him again in one of the fastest flying dismount I have ever done (on grass please!) to beat him to the timing mat.

T2 in 27 seconds (Course PB again! Woo hoo!)

I had a very fast transition. It helps that for sprint races, I have these Zoot shoes that I can wear without socks. I just “body glide” the cr*p out of them for easy entry. I came out of T2 within 3 feet of the race leader. But it turns out I was no match for him on the run, and he put distance right away.

Run 5 km in 20:11 (Course PB! Again…)
pace: 4 min 02 secs (Garmin had me at 3:58 with a 5.1km distance)
>>>GARMIN DATA

Here is the young race leader… then me coming out… Then Shawn on my heels.

For the first half of the course, the only thing I could think about was the pain and the strong desire to start walking. I almost did it. But I held on.

I really wanted to go sub 20′ on this course, and I managed to hold 3:58 pace on my Garmin watch, which would give it to me. But either the course was a bit long, or my watch was slightly off so I missed my target.

There’s a few loops and out-and-backs on the course, so you can see your competition pretty well. I was happy that I seemed to gain space on Shawn behind me. He did outran me at least once last year. So I was safe there. Forget about Mr First: he was just increasing his gap with me, and set a new course record. I am no match for these 17-18′ 5k runners (in a TRI!!!). But I could also see “Roman” coming up on me. Last year, he was passing me every time in the first km of the run. I try to hold on my position, but between 3 and 4 km he passed me in such a way that trying to tag along was not even an option. So I lost my second position. At least, he is now passing me at the end of the course. Give me another year or 2…

So… I obliterated my TREX course record. Last year’s best time was 1:05:08, and as seen above I was already ahead with eating cookies at 1:04.

Final Result: 1:02:46  | 3/425 overall | 1st Age Group
>>> Official Results Here

PODIUM! First ever 3rd position at a T-REX race (did 4th once last year).

Here is my split progression over the last 6 times I raced this course.. Interesting… and it will be hard to beat next time!

* Wetsuit Swim
** Speed Suit Swim

Craig also did an awesome race, beating his previous best time by 3 minutes or so.

Here’s what NOT TO DO in transition:

I did my transition in 44 seconds including wetsuit removal. Craig did his transition in 1:46 and he had no wetsuits to remove!!! I really need to force him to practice those! And he is the one laughing at me for practicing to quickly putting on my helmet….

Of course, he did his signature move, like 100m before the finishing line.

At least he did not get passed (by one of his wave anyway) doing so. Although looking at results, he definitely lost a few positions. Still, he did pretty good at 136/425 finish for the small amount of training he does (new baby… not that he was training that much before the baby haha!)

As usual, larger and better pictures in the album below.

2011 Triceratopr Tri

This entry was posted on Friday, June 17th, 2011 at 6:59 am and is filed under Sport and Races, Album update, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.